So while chatting with this group of mothers, I considered this lesson: when spreading the word about your product or service, it is just as important to promote all of your ancillary offerings as it is to promote your key features. Companies often promote just the core offering, but when selling to mothers, it is often the broader offer that will activate the sale.
The comment is about marketing to mothers, but I wonder if there isn't some food for thought here for manufacturers as well. How often do you talk about aspects of your business that surround your core product? If there's one mistake that industrial marketers make reliably, it is focusing exclusively on product at the expense of building an overall brand.
When I started out selling machine tools, I was handed a stack of brochures, given a primer on what these machines are and what they do, and sent out to beat the bushes for leads. From what my bosses had told me and what I was reading in the brochure, I assumed the conversations would be all about the product specifications. Instead, almost everyone wanted to talk about service. When I relayed this to my bosses, they waved it off. "Sure, we have service. Tell them we have great service." The fact was, no one had thought very much about how to present the service side of the company.
Part of that phenomenon comes from the distributor/OEM distribution model that exists in industrial machinery sales. OEMs want to make machines and let distributors take care of the service because it is time-consuming and requires constant attention to the customer and the daily bottom line. Distributors want OEMs to take care of service because the OEMs have deeper pockets and access to the product knowledge and parts. Good machine service techs are very, very hard to find. The result often is that the service arrangement between the dealer and the OEM is poorly defined and one or both parties are uncomfortable and pushing up against the boundaries in one direction or another. So no one is comfortable talking about service to the customer because no one is quite sure what they can or want to deliver.
Given all this, it isn't surprising that the machine tool company, Haas, that kicked everyone's butts through the '90s, was the one with the strongest service story. Haas kept service in-house, for one thing. The techs were OEM employees that drove around in Haas-branded vans full of spare parts. This meant the dealers made less money because they didn't get the higher discounts that came with a service contract, but it also meant they sold more because customers liked the Haas service story a lot. Haas' approach led to an overall brand impression of a company that really understood what its customers wanted and was going all-out to provide it.
In the industrial machinery and supplies game, it is rare that you are offering a truly unique product. Actually, that is true in just about any business. Even if you do have a proprietary technology, you are automatically limited to companies that have to have specifically that technology, if all you do is focus on the unique nature of your product. For continued growth, you have to have mass appeal, and that means offering something everyone wants, like great prices and service.
Don't keep hitting your customers with the same tired message about how great your best line is. Talk about your service. Your parts inventory. Your financing options. Your friendly, beer-buying salesmen. Your easy-to-use web portal. It isn't just mothers who want to know they are getting the whole package when they deal with a particular vendor.
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